When a user watches a video on a mobile phone, if the user wants to watch the video with another user at the same time, the user may transmit a played image of the video to a video playback device used by the another user, so that although the user and the another user are not in a same place, they still can watch the same video at the same time.
In the existing technology, the manner for implementing the foregoing video synchronous playback generally is: A mobile phone captures a video image currently played by the mobile phone, and transmits the image to a personal computer (PC); the PC transmits the image to a streaming server; and the streaming server sends the image to a target playback device. However, the image captured by the mobile phone is large and occupies large bandwidth in the transmission process, a transmission speed is low and causes a large frame latency of the target playback device, and a screen is frequently stuck. Therefore, user experience is poor.